yesterday, republicans proposed steep spending cuts but gave no ground on president obama's call to raise taxes on the wealthiest americans. here's what the president told bloomberg's white house correspondent about that. >> unfortunately the speaker's proposal right now is still out of balance. you know he talks, for example, about $800 billion worth of revenue but was he says he's going to do that by lowering rates. when you look at the platte it doesn't work. when i've said is, i am prepared to work with the speaker and democrats and republicans to go after excessive health care costs in our federal health care system, we're going to have to strengthen those systems and i think we can do that without hurting seniors, without hurting beneficiaries. i think that, you know, there's probably more cuts that we can squeeze out, though we've made over a trillion worth of spending cuts. >> you'll remember only a week ago the democrats proposed their solution to this and it was rejected by the republicans. the president is reiterating that taxes have to go up on the nation's top 2% in order to